Heartlines
by lovely-fugitive
Summary: The night before Katniss and Peeta's reaping, Haymitch has to go for a walk. A one-shot motivated by how I think he'd be reacting to going through yet another reaping.


**Broken record of an author's note: **Another Haymitch one-shot that is filled with spoilers about Haymitch and some creative license on my part. Please enjoy, and don't forget (or ignore) that Review button. Merci beaucoup!

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><p><em>I hate the night before the reaping.<em> Maybe that's a selfish way to feel- except I lived through a reaping where I was picked. Not many people can say so, and only about 65 of them are still alive including me.

Granted, I'm not doing much with my life unless you count keeping the local moonshiners in business. It's nearly a guarantee that the kids I have to mentor die. The first few years I tried. I really did. I was young, and I thought that training up a victor might show the Capitol I still had some fight.

See, _that_ is selfish. The idea that I could turn a teenager or possibly a twelve year old into my own personal pawn is incredibly arrogant and naïve, something I would have only believed as a teenager.

No, now I know better and I should have realized it from the beginning: Panem's teenagers, especially District 12's, are too browbeaten. Wasn't I? By then the Capitol had taken everything that was important to me and either killed it or locked it up out of my reach. I still had my beautiful, big house and more money than I knew what to do with.

But I was angry. I was idealistic. I wanted revenge and I never got it. I never will get it, and I'm better off having let that desire burn out. Probably scarier, I did care about the kids. I used to get attached to them and everything.

Haymitch Abernathy, victor from the Seam, spends a good third of his waking hours wishing he could have died the first day of his Games… preferably during the bloodbath. That would have been abrupt, and odds are, relatively painless. Lucky for me, I'm not sober the other two-thirds of my waking hours. I can never handle myself well if I'm sober.

I am walking through the deserted town square to the Hob. It is dark, too late to expect the stalls to be open. There's no reason to be out right now, other than I don't want to be in. I know I should go home and eat but I won't. There's nothing in my pantry anyway.

One of our Peacekeepers passes me on his night rounds and I try to drum up his name from somewhere in the back of my mind. "Haymitch," he says with a smile, like we are old friends. Well, I am a fixture of the community, and that's close enough. Darius. His name is Darius. He looks closely at my face. "How are you doing?"

Even he must realize what a trite question that is because he flushes under his thick freckles. "Just walking," I say gruffly. "You know, tomorrow." In my head Effie Trinket is adding, '… is going to be a big, big, big day!' in her trilling, proper accent.

I ignore her. Darius hesitates before passing me, but he leaves without more comments. I think he doesn't have the temperament to be a Peacekeeper, but I would much rather have him than the dolts they'd ship in otherwise. It's been worse here in 12, but the people who remember that are old, dead now, or pretend things were never that bad.

The air smells like the start of summer, very dusty with a hint of damp grass. Sometimes the night before the reaping it is raining heavily as though the land itself is protesting the Capitol's tyranny. I still go for a walk if it is raining because I can do nothing but walk, and when I get tired of that, I drink. I can't or won't sleep. Usually by morning I am still drunk.

I try my best not to be hungover: that would be disrespectful and far less entertaining for the Capitol's cameras. Me, sitting there nursing a pounding headache is far less interesting than me making inappropriate remarks about everything.

I refuse to let myself wonder who might be reaped. Last year's kids wouldn't have made it even if I tried; they were two little kids from deep in the Seam who hadn't had a good meal in their lives. Neither of them weighed more than eighty pounds soaking wet. My mother didn't have much but she always made sure we were fed. Their parents won't look me in the eye anymore and I can't blame them. I was basically their kids' final shot at survival, or survival for one of them, in any case.

When the odds are _never_ in your favor, though, what the hell are you supposed to do?

Even if my tributes weren't consistently underweight and sub-par in essentially every way when compared to those in the other districts- except for maybe 11, who pulls kids out of school around age twelve to farm crops- I was still convinced the arena was usually rigged to kill them quicker than the others. It was pragmatic on the Gamemakers' parts. Our district was never a very popular contender. It hadn't been since I won the last Quell, and exactly how I won isn't even shown on the television.

This is a bad train of thought. It will have me going through my liquor much more quickly than I mean to. Most everyone thinks I have no self-control. That isn't true: I carefully monitor the rate at which I slip into drunkenness.

Okay, so maybe that's not the best kind of self-control.

The mentors in other districts don't have to be a mentor as long as I've been one. In fact, I come to a halt under the velvety blue sky. I can't think of one other mentor who has been doing this as long as me.

_Well, that's depressing. _

Except- and this hits me for the first time- I've probably collected more knowledge about the Games than any other victor. I decide that actually does render things very depressing, because one would think with all that knowledge I could keep just one tribute out of almost 50 alive. This only adds fuel to the fire that they really are killing off my tributes. My sad pathetic tributes, never fighters to begin with, can also count on some strategic injury or disaster.

A good ten years back a girl from 12 was raped during the Games. I don't mean the Capitol rigged that: it just happened. It was too sadistic even for Capitol tastes, so they've edited it out of the replays. However, what with the cameras following her as it happened, it was there while we were all watching the first time around. Probably, the guys in the control room secretly hoped it would add to the show and it did.

She went into shock after, so it was simple for the next tribute that found her laying face down in a ditch to just slide a knife through her heart. It sounds ridiculous, but I can't remember her name, only her face. She didn't even cry out then: she sort of just flopped over and died. That was the year I started my tradition of drinking copiously even in the screening room set aside for wealthy sponsors and the districts' mentors.

I threw what little care I had for protocol out the window as soon as I heard that brutalized girl's screams echo through the room, and realized almost everyone was trying to ignore them because she wasn't being killed, only raped. That didn't fit in with their romantic notions of fighting to the death.

Yeah, her screeching animal sounds while she tried to fight her assailant off made them uncomfortable. It made them wonder if, just maybe, the Games weren't pure spectacle and entertainment for their pleasure. I should give the mentors more credit than the sponsors, because they at least seemed properly horrified.

Since then I don't think there have been any more rapes, recorded or otherwise. It's definitely one of those unspoken rules, like not eating the bodies of fellow tributes no matter how hungry you get or how poisonous the food is in the arena. Don't eat another tribute. Don't rape another tribute.

I abruptly head back towards my empty house, thinking with annoyance of Effie and her Capitol crew who are occupying the empty house next to mine. It's only for tonight; I won't have permanent neighbors, not that any of Snow's lackeys would want to stay here in 12.

My keys clink as I let myself in and I look over at the house to my right. The lights are still on in the downstairs windows and there's the silver sound of cutlery hitting plates. The whole district is in a state of constant starvation ranging from missing every meal to having very rationed ones, but there they sit, eating Capitol finery.

"Tomorrow night, so will you," I mutter to myself.

The house is dark, and musty, because I never clean of my own accord. Sometimes a woman from the Hob, Greasy Sae, comes and cleans, but those days are few and far between because she can't stand me almost as much as I don't like my house being cleaned. I flick on a light and see the wooden box of old bottles on my kitchen table waiting for me.

For a brief moment I contemplate leaving them alone. I can't remember the last reaping I spent sober. _Why slip into good habits, then?_ The audience expects it by now, which is very strange when I think of myself as a young man. I was strong. I was good looking. I was disciplined. I still am smart. But it's a different kind of intelligence that I've earned.

I open a bottle with a crisp snap. It's going to be a long night, so I settle by the dirty hearth and stare at the dying orange embers like they will send me into some kind of trance. Honestly, that would be preferable but it's not going to happen.


End file.
